> I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
I work from home for a mid-sized company for <=40 hours a week. I turn off my computer at 5pm and don't think about work until 9am the next morning. I work with people I like and we get stuff done. And in spite of all that, we're hardly impoverished—my current forecast is I can retire 10 years early at this rate. Tech salaries are good everywhere in the US, they're just not as insane as they are in Silicon Valley.
I could probably retire even earlier if I were willing to enter the rat race, but I'd rather be there for my kids' childhoods than resurface from the grind just in time to send them off to college.
In other words, it's absolutely possible to choose to avoid it, and it doesn't even require much sacrifice.
For context outside of tech. I have a super flexible job with amazing benefits. I haven't missed a single thing my kids have done, unless I chose to.
And I'll work until I'm 75.
I say this not out of being bitter, but for the context that many (probably most) people who do what they love to do don't get the massive paychecks even mid-tier tech jobs get. Context is everything.
To be honest it vastly depends on what you expect to need in retirement. Based on my current salary and estimated retirement payment (which some online calculator calculated at ~2/3rds my income) I'm still slightly below what I should be saving for that. But by then I will both need more money to take care of family (hopefully) and less money since I should have long paid off my house and car by then.
My salary is much higher than household average but far from unheard of in tech. There are definitely some scrappy college grads getting offers higher than it. and I have 3+ decades to increase it.
If you’re lucky. Modern medicine still has yet to solve most major disabilities for people in their sixties. It will be hard to work if you’re suffering any of the innumerable disabling diseases. What will you do then?
Too bad by that time, someone will have figured out how to look up everything you've ever posted online to dig up insurance-invalidating comments like this one.
I work from home for a mid-sized company for <=40 hours a week. I turn off my computer at 5pm and don't think about work until 9am the next morning. I work with people I like and we get stuff done. And in spite of all that, we're hardly impoverished—my current forecast is I can retire 10 years early at this rate. Tech salaries are good everywhere in the US, they're just not as insane as they are in Silicon Valley.
I could probably retire even earlier if I were willing to enter the rat race, but I'd rather be there for my kids' childhoods than resurface from the grind just in time to send them off to college.
In other words, it's absolutely possible to choose to avoid it, and it doesn't even require much sacrifice.